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Today, professionals say amateur work is essential to help us understand how giant planets behave and how often they're hit by something. Amateurs were the ones who discovered Jupiter being smacked at least five times in recent years. And amateurs were called upon to help NASA and others figure out what to observe first when the Juno spacecraft arrived at the king of planets this summer.

An international team has recently solved this mystery, publishing their findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Observations by astronomers primarily from the University of Cape Town, using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) and other telescopes at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Sutherland, South Africa, revealed that the nebula was likely formed in a stellar explosion just over 1,500 years ago.

The latest result, PSR J1913+1102, is a radio pulsar Einstein@Home computers found in data from Arecibo. Because its partner is silent, at first astronomers only knew that the system contained a pulsar plus a companion in orbit. They pieced together numerous lines of evidence to arrive at the full picture. First, the total mass of the system was large, meaning the pulsar’s companion was at least as massive as the Sun. Many pulsars orbit smaller white dwarfs, so this was a big tip. Second, the nearly—but not quite—circular orbit of the system suggests that some force kicked the system after the pulsar had already evolved. The most reasonable explanation, then, is that the companion is also a neutron star, and the kick was its own supernova explosion as it ended its life as a main sequence star.

Amateur astronomy clubs in the city have been able to define the size and shape of an asteroid called 22 Kalliope and their observations have been recognised by the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA).

'I was agog,' said Patrick Wiggins, NASA/JPL solar system ambassador to Utah. 'It's inspiring that someone with very modest means could put that together. It shows they're very dedicated or a little loony or a bit of both.'

The primary is 70", the focal-ratio is f/6-ish, leaving a focal length of 420"/35' focal length.

The hunt for supernovae is available on Zoouniverse.org. The site allows citizen scientists to analyze images provided by the SkyMapper Transient Survey. This survey is searching and studying supernovae and other transient objects using the SkyMapper 1.3 m telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

Days after the Backyard Worlds website debuted on February 15, Bob Fletcher, a science teacher in Tasmania, identified a very faint object moving across the WISE images. It was soon also flagged by three other citizen scientists from Russia, Serbia, and the United States. After some initial investigation by the research team, which originally called the object "Bob's dwarf," Faherty was awarded time on NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, where she confirmed that it was a previously unknown brown dwarf just a few hundred degrees warmer than Jupiter. The authors say that sky surveys had missed this object because it's too faint. All four volunteers are co-authors on the scientific paper announcing the discovery.

PDS 110 is a star in the Orion OB1a association, northwest of Orion’s belt. The association, like many others in Orion, contains young, massive stars less than 20 million years old. PDS 110 itself is estimated to be 7 to 10 million years old and is still growing, accreting material from its natal cloud. The star’s mass is 1.6 times that of the Sun, but unlike the Sun, it emits a lot of light at infrared wavelengths, probably emitted by the surrounding gas and dust heated by the infant star’s radiation. Since it’s relatively bright, it has been the object of surveys for decades.

Pickering employed up to 80 women during his 42-year stint as director, at a time when women still did not even have the right to vote. This team of gifted and talented women went on to make huge contributions to astronomy as we know it today, and author Dava Sobel tells their untold tale in her latest book – The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

For more, read Rich Futrell's review of The Glass Universe in the April 2017 edition of Astral Projections on page 10.

Like the Daily Mail, Spaceweather also notes that Tilley is an amateur astronomer, but there's no elaboration on this aspect from either source. However, Tilley is clearly an amateur satellite tracker via radio, and particularly in the realm of spy satellites, which is how he stumbled on this one (lucky perhaps, but luck favors the prepared). The best story is Tilley's own, at his blog...

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